In a matter of weeks, the Oregon Ducks are going to be traveling down to Atlanta to take on the defending champion Georgia Bulldogs. It’s a game that holds more meaning this year than it would in other years, simply because Oregon’s new head coach Dan Lanning is less than a year removed from helping lead the Bulldogs to the promised land as their defensive coordinator.
If you take the drama away from the game, though, it is still a juicy matchup that will catch the attention of the college football world. That’s something that the Ducks have been able to do a number of times over the past few decades — schedule a big non-conference game at the start of the season to give the team a monster test before Pac-12 play begins.
We’ve seen Oregon on neutral sites in Dallas, in the belly of the beast in Columbus, or welcoming some top-ranked teams to Autzen Stadium. All of these matchups have been important, either getting the team off to a hot start on the season or derailing their potential championship hopes early on.
We decided to rank the best ones.
For this exercise, we looked at all of the non-conference games Oregon has played since 2000 — bowl games excluded, obviously — and put them in order of the ones where the result, either a win or a loss, meant the most for the team. Here’s what we came up with: